To date, determining from what points along a street it would be possible to view an advertising medium, a shop window or a signal had to be done manually. In countries where existed this need of determining the audience viewing an advertising medium (countries such as France, where an “affimetrie” study was conducted), a committee of persons was formed to decide, point by point, from what streets and from what positions a certain medium could be viewed. This entails a major manual task workload in addition to the subjectivity-related problems involved. The lack of immediacy and precision in the results is yet another problem, as it takes a long time for the human teams to complete the assigning of axes to the streets for all of the advertising media in the country (shop windows, automatic cash points, branch banks, etc.) employing the same criteria. Nor can personalized analyses be made if some characteristics, such as day or night or the reading distance are changed.
Another additional drawback is that the visibility zones can be irregular in shape and depend upon many different parameters. Furthermore, no system has been implemented to date which functions automatically taking three dimensions into account.